Saturday, February 23, 2019

March 3, 2019 - Transfiguration Sunday

The Christian
liturgical year alternates between highs and lows, between peaks of glory and
valleys of need and penitence.

At this point
in the year we have the extremes of such an alternation:This week is Transfiguration Sunday, but it
is followed in a few days by Ash Wednesday, and then the first Sunday in
Lent.In seven days, the high of Glory
and the low of fasting and penitence.

Exodus
34:29-35.

The reading from the Torah for this Sunday
concerns the special status of Moses
– the mediator of the commands of the Lord to the people.

In the
history of tradition in Israel,
Moses’ status grew greater and greater.Increasingly he was seen as the human who linked the people to God and
through whom (alone) God delivered instruction (torah) to the people.In this passage we hear a speculative, almost
playful, visualization of such an awesome human role.

What must it
have been like?

What
would have happened when a human being – even a mighty man like Moses – stood
with God on repeated occasions to hear God’s instruction?

Our narrative
lifts up one aspect of such near-to-heaven adventures by Moses.

“Moses did
not know that the skin of his face shown because he had been talking with God”
(verse 29, NRSV).The verb translated “shown” comes from the Hebrew noun meaning “horn.”Moses, it is said, was “en-horned.”

The image
refers to the way horns on cattle may form a larger circle around the animal’s
head.The story is saying that Moses had
a halo; his face glowed with reflected light from the divine glory.(Thousands of years later, Michelangelo would
paint Moses with actual horns coming out of his head, because of this
passage.)The Greek translation says
Moses’ face was “glorified,” the perfect tense of a verb derived from the noun doxa,
glory.

This midrashic
story goes on to elaborate two
consequences of Moses’ reflected glory.First, this heavenly radiation scared people away (verse
30).Moses was dangerous, or at least
belonged to a different realm, not to be approached by ordinary folks.Moses could not transmit the commands of God
to the people if they wouldn’t come near him.Moses called out to them, so they would recognize that it was really he
and not some dangerous superhuman force, and gradually, because they
recognized him, they approached – the leaders first, and finally all the
ordinary people (verses 31-32).Then
Moses was able to give them “in commandment all that the Lord had spoken to him
on Mount Sinai” (verse 32).

When the fear
was overcome, they could hear the directions for right living.

The second
consequence of Moses’ glory was the
veil (verses 33-35).Moses put a veil over his face when he was
not addressing the people, a veil he took off, of course, when he returned to
hear God again.The timing of the veil is
significant.“When he came out, and told
the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see the face of
Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on
his face again, until he went in to speak with” God (verses 34-35).

When
delivering the revelation to the people, the veil was not on his face.The glowing face was a sign that Moses was
speaking as the divine messenger; the veil was a sign that revelation was off,
Moses was not acting as the mediator.

Psalm 99.

The theme of
glory is extended in the psalm reading,
though now it is more the holy that is emphasized.This is one of the greatest of the
“Enthronement of the Lord” psalms.(Others are Psalms 47, 93, 96-98.)Modern scholars have come to recognize that
the kingship of the Lord was not
just a reference to an eternal quality of God, but was an event in time, that is, liturgical time.

The opening
words of this psalm may be translated, “Yahweh, He has become king!”In the sequence of events over a several-day
festival, there was a dramatic climax that represented the Enthronement.Some ritual event occurred, in early times
probably involving the appearance of the Ark.

This ritual
action, however done, represented the special moment of the Lord’s triumph over
the powers of chaos and the restoration of peace and harmony (shalom).These enthronement psalms were sung – with
much other shouting, horn blowing, and music making – at this climactic moment
in God’s relation to the world and its peoples.

This was also
supremely a moment of revelation,
revelation to the world and the nations of both the fact of God’s rule
and of the character of God’s rule:

Mighty King,
lover of justice,

you have established equity;

you have
executed justice

and righteousness in Jacob (verse 4, NRSV).

The supreme
acclamation of a just God as sovereign over all of life – that is what these
enthronement psalms are really about!

Among
enthronement psalms, only this one refers to specific historic figures, those
of Moses, Aaron, and Samuel (verse 6).The familiar history of Israel’s
early leaders is not usually mentioned in such high liturgical psalms.In this supreme example of such psalms, the
old Israelite story and the glory of Zion
are closely wedded!

II
Corinthians 3:12-4:2.

In the Epistle reading Paul is doing his own midrash on Moses’ veil.

As Paul reads
the Torah passage, the glowing of Moses’ face gradually faded after he had
spoken with God.Thus, says Paul, Moses
put the veil on to prevent the Israelites from seeing that the glory had faded
away.

More to the
point, Paul relates Moses’ veil to the old law that was written on tablets of
stone (mentioned just before, in the Exodus passage).The challenge of true religion – the “new”
covenant – is how to get God’s will written on the hearts of people
rather than on cold stone tablets.The
way that happens, says Paul, is through the
Spirit.

In this
passage, the Spirit (of God) and the Law are opposites; the Law condemns, the
Spirit makes alive.Also, the face of
Moses and the face of Jesus are opposites.By looking at the glory of God in Jesus’ face, one is taken up by the
Spirit of God, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom [from the
Law]” (verse 17, NRSV).

The climax is
very loaded:“And all of us, with
unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord [in Jesus’ face] as though
reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image [of God, in
which humans were originally created] from one degree of glory to another…”
(verse 18).

Luke
9:28-36, (37-43).

Climaxing all
these Biblical themes of beholding God’s glory, the Gospel reading presents Luke’s version of the Transfiguration.Matthew
and Mark pretty much agree in how they tell this scene.Luke, however, has several variations in his
way of telling it.(Even the Gospel
According to John has something like the transfiguration, John
12:28-30.)

What the Gospel narratives have in common is
that this is a special moment – different from the usual presence of Jesus to
his disciples.This is a moment of
supreme revelation.For a moment, the
three selected disciples see Jesus in his true heavenly reality, a reality that
is veiled from people during his earthly ministry.In that special moment of revelation Jesus is
seen as a companion of Moses and Elijah, the greatest mediators of law and
prophecy for the chosen people.

Such a vision
is certainly one of “glory.”For the
change in Jesus, Matthew and Mark use the special word “transfigured,” while
Luke keeps it simpler:“the appearance
of his face changed.”All agree that the
robes of the heavenly figures became brilliantly white.

All three
Gospels agree that the transfiguration comes at a turning point in Jesus’
ministry.The disciples have just
recognized him as the Anointed One (Messiah), and he has just announced that,
Special One of God though he is, he now has to go to Jerusalem
to suffer, die, and rise from the dead.

The
transfiguration is the moment of revealed glory before the humility and
suffering become more intense.

But our reading also
has Luke’s special variations on the
common story.First, as often, Luke
shows Jesus in prayer.He takes the
three disciples up the mountain to pray.And it was while Jesus was praying that he was transformed, that his
heavenly identity became transparent to those who believed in him.

Secondly, a very
distinctive point in Luke, Moses and Elijah not only appear with Jesus, but we
hear what they are talking about.“They
… were speaking of his departure [exodos], which he was about to
accomplish at Jerusalem” (verse 31,
NRSV).

More explicitly than
others, Luke makes clear that there is a
divine script for Jesus’ story.The
script is written in heaven, and the great worthies who have passed on are able
to read it.They can consult with their
peer, or leader, about the enormous task he faces in order to carry out, as
they did, his commission to labor and suffer for a dull and resistant
people.For a brief moment, the glory is
revealed before the Servant moves toward his cross.

The optional reading (verses 37-43) moves to events after descent
from the mountain.A father
brings his only son to be delivered from a demonic possession that seizes him
periodically.The disciples cannot
exorcise this demon; Jesus does.

The Luke version of
this episode emphasizes the demonic violence.The desperate father reports, “Suddenly a
spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks.It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will
scarcely leave him.I begged your disciples
to cast it out, but they could not” (verses 39-40, NRSV).Then, when Jesus has asked them to bring the
boy, “the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions” (verse 42).The demonic violence is worse here than in
any other exorcism story.

We may guess that
Luke has preserved all this detail about the demonic violence in order to show
the reaction of the spirit world to
the revelation of Jesus’ glory on the mountain – and the inevitable doom that
Jesus’ going to Jerusalem means for
the demons!Only Luke’s version of the
Transfiguration includes a direct reference to the passion in Jerusalem,
and only Luke’s version of the sequel leaps immediately to the story of the
outburst of demonic frenzy among the people who follow Jesus.

The Jesus of heavenly glory, disguised for now as a
humble servant on his way to Jerusalem, is a revelation that drives the demons crazy!

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About Me

I taught Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School for 20 years, then spent 14 years in hospital management. In semi-retirement I was Chief Financial Officer for Protestants for the Common Good for 13 years, and began to write Lectionary Studies there. In 2011, I wrote a series of reviews of Study Bibles available at that time, which are now going up slowly on the JW Study Bibles blog. I have enjoyed Biblical study and Biblical scholarship off and on for about sixty-five years.